On My Slaveholding Ancestors

Regarding ancestral slave owning (which accusation some complete and utter idiot has attempted to smear Richard Dawkins with — and no, I’m not linking to it, because I don’t link to complete and utter idiots):

Just in case the charge is ever leveled at me:

I’m pretty sure my ancestors had chariots up on blocks in the front yard as far back as Ancient Egypt, and probably lived next to the rutway in Ancient Greece. I’d lay money that my forebears single-handedly carried the White Trash mutation forward into the modern era, and were thus perpetually too poor to own slaves.

My clan’s main contribution to human civilization has been to grace the pages of the Darwin Awards by choking to death on beer can tabs, falling off porches and breaking our necks while taking a drunken piss into the front yard, and accidentally shooting off our testicles during liquored-up midnight poaching runs at our neighbors’ cattle.